Julie Otsuka - When the Emperor Was Divine

“I wouldn’t say that,” said her mother.

“You didn’t,” said the girl.

“We’ll find you another umbrella when we get off the train,” said his mother.

“We’re never getting off this train,” said the girl.

“We are,” said her mother. “Tomorrow.”

The boy began to hit the side of his head with the orange.

“Stop that,” said his mother.

The boy stopped. He bit down hard into the thick skin of the orange and the juice ran down his chin.

“Not like that,” said his mother. She took the orange and began to peel it slowly in one continuous motion. They were in no hurry, after all. “Like this,” she said. Her hands were thin and white and had only recently begun to spot with age. She had married late and had her children late and now she was aging early. “Are you watching me?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the boy. He opened his mouth and she placed a section of orange on his tongue.

The girl slipped the remaining cards one by one out the window until there was only one card left in her hand: the six of clubs. She could think of nothing special about the six of clubs. She turned the card over and looked at the photograph of Glacier Falls on the back. The summer before last her father had hired an Indian driver—a Hindu, he had called him—to take them to Yosemite and they had stayed at the Ahwahnee Hotel for a week. She had bought the deck of cards at the gift shop and her brother had bought a red wooden tomahawk. Every night they had eaten dinner in the fancy dining room beneath the enormous chandeliers. The waiters had worn tuxedos and called her miss and whatever she had asked for they had brought to her on a round silver tray. Every night she had asked for the same thing. Lobster. The lobster at the Ahwahnee was very good.

She wrote down her name across the six of clubs and slipped the card out the window.

TOWARD EVENING the train was near Elko. A man on the side of the road was stepping out of an old red truck. A woman sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. The girl knew what the woman was staring at. She was staring at nothing. There was nothing out there to see. The man kicked the door of the truck over and over again as steam rose up from under the hood. “That’s right, just kick and kick,” said the girl. A raven flew across the sky and then the truck disappeared.

Her brother tapped her arm.

“What is it?”

“Trampled,” he said. “That man was trampled.” He licked the tip of his finger and drew an X through the dust on the window.

The girl opened her suitcase and gave him a piece of paper and a pencil. “Here,” she said, “you can draw on this.”

The boy drew a large square and inside of the square he drew a little man in a suit with giant shoe trees for feet. “That’s Papa,” he said. He added a mustache but something about the mustache was not quite right.

“Too wide,” said the girl.

“That’s it.” He erased the mustache and part of the man’s mouth and then he drew the mustache again, only not as wide, but forgot to fix the mouth. He gave the pencil back to his sister. “You draw,” he said.

She took the pencil and drew a sky full of stars above the man’s head.

“Give him a hat, too.”

She drew a wide black fedora with a tiny feather tucked beneath the hatband. The girl was very good at drawing. The year before last she had won first prize at Lincoln Elementary School for her line drawing of a pinecone. She had simply concentrated on seeing the pinecone and the drawing had drawn itself. She had hardly looked down at her pencil at all.

Soon the boy fell asleep and she took out her father’s postcards from her suitcase. One of them showed a tiny man fishing on the bank of a river. Beneath him were the words Greetings from Montana, The Treasure State. Another one showed the highest stack in the world. The highest stack in the world was in Anaconda, Montana. She flipped through the pictures of the Indian pueblos and the ancient cliff dwellings until she came to the postcard of the largest and finest auditorium in New Mexico: the Seth Hall Gymnasium at Santa Fe High School. Seth Hall looked like an enormous adobe house, only with cross bars over the windows. On the back of the card her father had written her a short note: Finally, summer has arrived. I am in good health and hope you all are well. I know your birthday is coming up soon. Please let me know what you would like and I will order it from the City of Paris department store in San Francisco and have them send it to you. Be good to your mother while I am away. Love, Papa. At the bottom of the card there was a P.S. and then a line of text that had been blacked out by the censors. She wondered what it was her father had wanted to tell her. She had not written him back—every day was like every other day and she could never think of anything new to say—but the blue silk scarf and the tiny bottle of Sweet Serenade perfume had arrived in the mail on her birthday anyway. She had used up the Sweet Serenade a long time ago. Now she could not even remember what it smelled like.

Outside the window dusk was falling. The mountains glowed red along the ridge tops and behind them the sky had turned deep violet. A soldier—a different soldier from before—walked through the car calling out, “Shades down.” From sunset until sunrise they had to keep the shades drawn. She put the postcards away and pulled down the shade. Her mother placed an old wooden suitcase beneath the window and sat down on the lid so the girl and boy could have the seats to themselves. “Lie down,” she said to them. “Try and sleep.”

LATER THAT EVENING the girl awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Someone had thrown a brick through a window but the gas lamps were broken and it was too dark to see. She was sweating and her throat was dry and sore and she wanted a glass of cold milk but she could not remember where she was. At first she thought she was in her yellow bedroom in the white stucco house in Berkeley but she could not see the shadow of the elm tree on the yellow wall or even the yellow wall itself so she knew she was not there, she was back in the stalls at Tanforan. But at Tanforan there were gnats and fleas and the awful smell of the horses and the sound of the neighbors on either side fighting until late in the night. At Tanforan the partitions between the stalls did not reach all the way up to the ceiling and it was impossible to sleep. The girl had slept. Just now she had slept. She had slept and dreamed about her father again so she knew she was not at Tanforan, either.

She called out for her mother.

Her mother reached out from her seat on the suitcase and put her hand on the girl’s forehead and smoothed back her wet black hair and said, “Hush, baby,” and the girl, who still could not remember where she was, remembered that her mother had not called her baby for a long time, not since the summer White Dog had run away and not come home for a week. This was before White Dog had grown old and tired and hurt his leg on the lawn mower. This was when White Dog was still a noisy white dog that would bark at anything no matter how big that thing was. This was when the girl was still eight and her father had let her walk alone to the corner store on a Sunday with a handful of pennies while he stood on the front porch and watched. She had come home with a fat copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and they had sat in the kitchen drinking large glasses of steaming hot cocoa and reading the comics—first Dick Tracy and Moon Mullins and then her favorite, Invisible Scarlet O’Neil—and nobody else in the house had been awake. Now she was eleven and she could not remember where she was. It was late at night and her mother was calling her baby and asking her if she was all right.